Update(2024): Heroku no longer has free services available.

Heroku provides the free webhosting for facebook applications. If you want to know more about Heroku you can visit their sites. They have very good introduction. From October 1, 2011, see here https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/497/ Facebook required the https connection for Facebook application and Heroku freely provides it. Great. Thanks to Heroku.

This guide is for Ubuntu only and was prepared with Ubuntu11.10.

Recenlty, I was trying to use the free hosting provided by Heroku. This is something which according to my experience have to say is difficult for newbies. I will suggest to heroku with Ubuntu.

Anyway, the actual that I got while installing heroku was this.

samundra@mystic-angel:~$ heroku login  
/home/samundra/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom\_require.rb:36:in `require’: no such file to load — readline (LoadError)  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom\_require.rb:36:in `require’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/heroku-2.29.0/lib/heroku/command/run.rb:1:in `<top (required)>’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom\_require.rb:36:in `require’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom\_require.rb:36:in `require’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/heroku-2.29.0/lib/heroku/command.rb:15:in `block in load’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/heroku-2.29.0/lib/heroku/command.rb:14:in `each’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/heroku-2.29.0/lib/heroku/command.rb:14:in `load’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/heroku-2.29.0/lib/heroku/cli.rb:24:in `start’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/heroku-2.29.0/bin/heroku:16:in `<top (required)>’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/bin/heroku:19:in `load’  
 from /home/samundra/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/bin/heroku:19:in `<main>’

The issue is with the readline package used by the heroku. I had ruby1.9.2 which wasn’t compiled with readline.

So, to solve this I first installed the readline package.

samundra@mystic-angel:sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev

Then cd to the directory

samundra@mystic-angel:cd ~/.rvm/src/ruby-1.9.2-p180/ext/readline

and then compiled the extension manually.

samundra@mystic-angel:ruby extconf.rb  

samundra@mystic-angel:make  
samundra@mystic-angel:make install

That’s it. If you are having problem following the instruction, please post them in comment. I will try to reply them as soon as possible.